zendan wrote:people spliced VIDEO back in the 60s and early 70s before digital systems came to be
Video and audio editing went hand in hand in those days. Audio was recorded separately and had to be manually synced. If they cut footage from a video recording and were recording live audio with it, the audio tape had to be cut and spliced also.
zendan wrote:audio cassettes can't be spliced, and why would you want to?
To fix them or make tape loops. When your homeboy's hoopty ate your Return to the 36 Chambers tape and you had to rip it out of the deck with the tape pulled out and wrapped around the hub, a little precision scotch tapping could allow you to listen to the rest of the undamaged tape.
zendan wrote:you make a mistake, you do another take
Recording wasn't always a end user thing. Most musicians didn't record their own music or even had knowledge of how to. A band might record an album in Detroit and send the reels to a guy in London to mix and master. Engineers had to work magic when they couldn't have the musicians on site.
Besides the music industry, you have to remember most all audio broadcastings used tape in those days. A radio station might do a 4 hour interview with someone, but only had a 1 hour segment to air it in. So, they had to chop it down. Or a musician might be commissioned to write a song for a tv commercial. They write a 2:30 minute song, but it's a 45 second commercial. Someone in a "Cutting Room" has to chop it to fit. Sure they could bounce to another machine or patch it through to another track, and they probably did as audio tech became more advanced, but anyone knows that has worked with tape for a while, it degrades the more you record over it. Big budget productions always used fresh tape.
A number of other reasons engineers would splice tape - Tape machines like all mechanical things fuck up. Older machines didn't have auto stop, they would get to end of the reel and rip the tape off the supply reel or stretch it. Starting the tape from a dead stop, over and over would stretch the beginning also. Engineers would add leader tape to protect the magnetic tape or so they could use all of the recordable media. Just like turntables, old tape machines took a split second to get up to running speed, they might add leader tape to this portion and punch in afterwards. They also used color tape to have visual cue markings on the reel. They had paper tape and time coded tape that would get spliced in. They would splice to add more tape to a reel. Tape loops were created to play sounds on repeat, much like a sampler is today. A theater play might need 5 minutes of the sound of ocean waves. For a engineer to sit and dub this over and over would have been time consuming and would take hundreds of feet of tape, where as they could do it with say, 8 feet by making a tape loop.
What's a tape spliced block used for if audio engineers didn't cut tape?
Why did the open reel tape machine become the industry standard, when there were closed cartridge machines were available, if engineers didn't need a hands-on way to edit tape?
zendan wrote:so can you tell me why either of those things matter?
Well, if your making really basic recordings all you may ever need is 1 stereo track. But you want to record a 10 piece drum kit or a 6 piece band, you'll probably need more tracks. The other part matters because it's history, some of the techniques, terminology, and functions on our samplers, that we used to make beats and sound design, were invented by tape wizards over half a century ago.
zendan wrote:why would anyone splice tape today?
Why would anyone want to make beats on a 20 year old sampler?
Why would anyone collect records, when 50 of them take up over a cubic foot of space and smell like death and decay, when they could carry thousands of albums on a chip the size of a finger nail?
Because audio nerds love fucking with arcane tech.
Next week, we discuss the virtues and pitfalls of DATs...
